EDUCATION FOR THE GOOD SOCIETY - Support

of tasks for its citizens to perform – might notrequire the sort of ‘re-skilling’ adult educationoften performs. Similarly, a society that held fastto a particular set of truths (religious, scientific,political or other) might see little need for itscitizens to pursue other lines of enquiry or mightactively seek to suppress them.These examples suggest that the sort of societythat does value adult education is likely to be animperfect one – and one that acknowledges itsimperfections; a society that acknowledges thattotal equality in childhood is impossible, as muchthrough accidents of circumstance as materialdifferences; a society that realises the possibilitiesand threats posed by change; a society thatis not static but is changed and challenged bynewcomers and new developments; and one witha relatively high life expectancy. This remindsus that a ‘good’ society is one that is constantlyin a dialectic relationship to ‘less good’ aspectsof itself and to the necessity of change. It mighteven follow from this that adult education ismore likely to be valued within a society thathas experienced profound change – such as awar or other devastation, or the collapse of thedominant economic model, with consequencesfor the worldview, quality of life and futureprospects of its inhabitants (and for the hierarchiesbetween different people, which adulteducation itself can do so much to disrupt). 7 Sucha society might need adult education to equip itscitizens to survive, existentially and practically,in new circumstances and so that they could helpthe younger population to adapt as well.Where are we now?Our society places some value on adulteducation, but we value it (at best) in an ambivalentway. New Labour’s record was contradictory,with notable investment in adult andfurther education after 1997 but patchy results.Further education faced devastating cuts beforethe change of government in 2010 and adulteducation as a coherent entity within universitieshas all but disappeared. The creation of theCampaigning Alliance for Lifelong Learning(CALL), in the last years of New Labour, was justone symptom of the unease felt by professionalsand students in both sectors. 8Nor is the situation improving under theCoalition. For example, the new funding arrangementsfor universities post-2012 are designedfor a model in which the vast majority of undergraduateentrants are school leavers. This hasprofound implications for the scope and range ofany efforts to widen participation, as opposed tosimply increasing it, since it excludes those wholeave school at an earlier stage.Even when the New Labour governmentsmade some attempt to support adult learning,they seemed rather vague about what they weretrying to do. For example, in 2009 the LabourGovernment launched a £20 million ‘transformation’fund for ‘informal adult learning’. SionSimon, the further education minister, explainedhow it was designed to work in a BBC interview:Sion Simon: [It’s] kind of an innovation fund, toback people who’ve got new ideas about innovativeways of doing informal adult learning, i.e. thekind of learning that people do for pleasure, forfun, rather than for qualifications or for work.Interviewer: We’re talking about perhaps learninga foreign language [because] you want to have asecond home, in the days when people still boughtsuch things… rather than doing learning that isfor skills?Sion Simon: Yeah the focus of governmentpolicy over the last few years and indeed nowin these straitened times has been very muchon skills, on qualifications, on giving people –particularly the lower skilled – the skills andqualifications they need to get back into work. Butwe also have a commitment, and that’s what thiswhite paper is about, to the kind of learning thatpeople do for pleasure… and what we’re trying todo is find new and exciting ways of helping peopleto do that more.Interviewer: When you say ‘new and exciting’,you immediately think this all has to be done onthe cheap somehow. And you’ve got to get peoplein there to staff it as well. It sounds a rathercuriously unfocused plan…Sion Simon: I’m not talking about theGovernment setting up courses for people. Whatthis is really about is, er, helping people to domore of things that they already do. So, forinstance, there’s a huge amount of learning thatgoes on that is self-organised and with the adventof the world wide web, which itself is fundamen-7 This is not to ignore the factthat, within such a society, theremight still be particular andacute constraints on how sucheducation could be organised orfunded.8 See www.callcampaign.org.uk/.Education for the good society | 41